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SECTION X Art Activities 1. Sense Qualities as Consequences of Evolution and as Social Lecture XXXI. June 3, 1901 THE ASSUMPTION THAT was involved in putting the art activities in the third class1 was that they represent completely mediated experience , an experience so completely mediated that the processes ofeffort, tension, reconstruction, have disappeared and left simply the fruit of their labors behind them. They represent a sort of experience in which we get the advantage, the import, of the processes ofjudgment (with the struggle that that involves) without the struggle itself, or at least without a consciousness of the struggle. We have to assume that the adjusting mechanism which represents the method of adaptation has been so thoroughly worked out that it is set off, so to speak, by a slight stimulus, a stimulus, therefore, which does not intrude itselfupon us as a distinct and separate stimulus. And consequently the response is made with such facility that it does not obtrude itself either as a separate, distinct process. The process and product are fused and come to us in a single and immediate whole. Ofcourse, any adequate treatment would have to state how that can be and yet not get habit with its mechanical features. For practically what I said about the presence ofthe stimulus and the adjusting mechanism , and the ease with which the response and mechanism play into each other, applies also to habit. I am not prepared to show how they can be so near alike and yet be so far distinct from each other in the actual conscious value accompanying them. It is evident that there 1. Section VII, Part 1, 4. Apparently, Dewey places art among the professional activities because, like the professions, it is concerned with performing the service of mediation. 420 Social Ethics 421 must be a tension in the aesthetic experience which there is not in the habit; otherwise there would not be this unification of consciousness which is so marked a sign ofthe aesthetic experience. There would not be that reduction ofconsciousness which is the uniform accompaniment of the habitual tendencies. I simply indicate what the state ofthings must be, without stopping to indicate how it is so or why it is so. All the tensions are within the experience. There is a sort ofmoving equilibrium by which the various elements actually stimulate and inhibit each other in such a way that each one serves to define each other in consciousness, bring it out in consciousness. And yet that equilibrium of adjustment, of balance, of mutual stimulation and response, is so complete that the process of adjustment does not obtrude itself as a distinctive factor requiring distinctive attention. That statement is rather on the psychological and logical side than on the social. The point which is ofimmediate concern here is that this completely mediated experience must represent a completely socialized experience. To put it in terms of the standpoints we have been discussing before: The artistic experience represents the activities which immediately conserve the organism, but that those activities represent the conscious side in terms of the values which have been worked out by them in the whole social process. In the social process in this sense has got to be put the life ofanimals, in so far as the life of animals is integrally bound up with our own life experience. There is a certain sense in which we must extend society lengthwise, not merely crosswise. The point was brought out in the class one day that we have to consider society from the historic, consecutive point ofview as well as from the standpoint ofexisting contemporaneous [events] in different parts of earth.2 In that historic, consecutive society, if we accept the theory of evolution the animal life is a part. They are cooperative factors in our experience. If it were not for the doctrine of biological evolution, to say that animals that lived ages ago and died ages ago were cooperative forces in our experience would sound like a very mystical statement. But if we take that theory we are bound to recognize, first, that our bodily mechanism, our sense organs, etc., are tools which animals worked out-in one sense not consciously and teleologically for us, but so far as the result is concerned we get the benefit of the struggle and the adaptations which these animals had to make-just as much as if we had hired them to do this work for us. And secondly, that...

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